Christopher rightly points to how the A-bomb becomes a metaphor in the noir world. The audience in a noir film is always wondering when the doomed individuals are going to explode and take the rest of the world with them. His study uses the decaying American city as both a macrocosm symbolizing the erosion of the individual and a microcosm of the world in imminent ruin.

Fittingly, the conclusion of Kiss Me Deadly (Christopher calls it "perhaps the most perfectly realized noir film ever made") acts as an allegory for personal, social and global breakdown and obliteration. "A society at once barbaric and overly refined [is] devouring itself."

The psychic lunar landscape was translated into the noir vision of the modern American city as a region of devastation. The landscapes everybody saw in the newsreels following the bombing of Hiroshima and Nagasaki were translated into scenes of urban blight in the noir films that followed. We are all capable of psychic meltdown, and because we now have the technology, any city in the world can be ground zero.

Noir, like most film, does not center on intellectual examinations of the world. It is a genre that focuses on emotions; powerful, painful, intense, unavoidably messy emotions. The social and psychic wounds of a post-Second World War world (little surprise, Christopher notes, that noir films are littered with bitter, displaced and cynical World War II veterans) festered and fed the film industry, which came up with what the French critics dubbed film noir.

The pain that informs the noir film is never completely understood while the sources of the social dis-ease and corruption that creates a noir world are rarely explored in much depth. The avaricious and self-serving political and economic engines that eat up the individual in a noir world are beyond the ken of most noir filmmakers (indeed, money is the key focus of much activity in noir films; it is the way to freedom and empowerment. However, the love of money is also given the traditional presentation, as the root of all evil. Paradox is right at home in the confused and confusing world of noir film).

The central limitation of noir film as social document is its almost willful lack of a sense of the larger social order. The power structures that help create the noir city--political, economic, military--are rarely even mentioned in noir films. Yet, despite this lack of intellectual curiosity or understanding, noir films offer an important insight into the psyche of post-war American society, with the archetypal rugged American individual struggling against a nameless and faceless Orwellian authority.

go back ... or continue to the next page: Film Noir as a Product of Rapid Social Change

To buy the book, click here to visit Amazon.com